The third eye is a mystical and esoteric concept referring in part to the brow chakra in certain Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. It is also spoken of as the gate that leads within to inner realms and spaces of higher consciousness.

In New Age spirituality, the third eye may alternately symbolize a state of enlightenment or the evocation of mental images having deeply personal spiritual or psychological significance. The third eye is often associated with visions, clairvoyance, precognition, and out-of-body experiences.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, the third eye is a symbol of enlightenment. In the Indian tradition, it is referred to as the gyananakashu, the eye of knowledge, which is the seat of the ‘teacher inside’ or antar-guru. The third eye is commonly denoted in Indian and East Asian iconography with a dot or mark on the forehead of deities or enlightened beings, such as Shiva, the Buddha, or any number of yogis, sages and bodhisattvas. This symbol is called the “Eye of Wisdom”, or, in Buddhism, the urna. In Hinduism, it is believed that the opening of Shiva’s third eye causes the eventual destruction of the physical universe.

According to Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian writings, the third eye is localized in the pituitary body and the pineal gland. It was said that in the far past, when man was in touch with the inner worlds, these organs were his means of ingress thereto, and they will again serve that purpose at a later stage. According to this view, they were connected with the involuntary or sympathetic nervous system, and to regain contact with the inner worlds it is necessary to establish the connection of the pineal gland and the pituitary body with the cerebrospinal nervous system. It was said that when that is accomplished, man will again possess the faculty of perception in the higher worlds, but on a grander scale than it was in the distant past, because it will be in connection with the voluntary nervous system and therefore under the control of his will.

Some writers and researchers, including H. P. Blavatsky and Rick Strassman, have suggested that the third eye is in fact the partially dormant pineal gland, which resides between the two hemispheres of the brain. The pineal gland is said to secrete dimethyltryptamine, which induces dreams, near-death experiences, meditation, or hallucinations. Various types of lower vertebrates, such as reptiles and amphibians, can actually sense light via a third parietal eye, a structure associated with the pineal gland, which serves to regulate their circadian rhythms.

Remote Viewing refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.

It was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a 20 million dollar research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena.

Remote viewing, like other forms of extra sensory perception, is generally considered as pseudoscience due to the need to overcome fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles currently held by the scientific community, and the lack of a positive theory that explains the outcomes.

In 1972 Stanford Research Institute laser physicist Hal Puthoff tested remote viewer Ingo Swann, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project. As research continued, the SRI team published papers in Nature, in Proceedings of the IEEE, and in the proceedings of a symposium on consciousness for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials including John McMahon, became strong supporters of the program. By the mid 1970s, facing the post-Watergate revelations of its “skeletons,” and after internal criticism of the program, the CIA dropped sponsorship of the SRI research effort.

In the early 1990s the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by DIA chief Soyster, appointed an Army Colonel, William Johnson, to manage the reinstated remote viewing project and evaluate its objective usefulness. According to an account by former SRI-trained remote-viewer, Paul Smith, Johnson spent several months running the remote viewing unit against military and DEA targets, and ended up a believer, not only in remote viewing’s validity as a phenomenon but in its usefulness as an intelligence tool.

After the Democrats lost control of the Senate in late 1994, funding declined and the program went into decline. The project was transferred out of DIA to the CIA in 1995, with the promise that it would be evaluated there, but most participants in the program believed that it would be terminated.

Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms.

Clairvoyance is the apparent ability to gain information about an object, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses. It is considered to be a form of extrasensory perception.

Current thinking among proponents of clairvoyance suggests that most people are born with clairvoyant abilities but then start to subliminate them as their childhood training compels them to adhere to acceptable social norms. Numerous institutes offer training courses that attempt to revive the clairvoyant abilities present in those early years.

Precognition denotes a form of extrasensory perception where a person is said to perceive information about places or events through paranormal means before they happen. A related term, presentiment, refers to information about future events which is said to be perceived as emotions. These terms are considered by some to be special cases of the more general term clairvoyance.

Those skeptical of the existence of precognition believe that the human memory naturally has a tendency to remember coincidences more often than other non-coincidences and thus individuals tend to remember more frequently when they were correct about a future event and forget the instances when they were wrong.

J. W. Dunne, a British aeronautics engineer, undertook the first systematic study of precognition in the early twentieth century. In 1927, he published the classic An Experiment with Time, which contained his findings and theories. Dunne’s study was based on his own precognitive dreams, which involved both trivial incidents in his own life and major news events appearing in the press the day after the dream.

When first realizing that he was seeing the future in his dreams, Dunne worried that he was a freak. His worries soon eased when he discovered that precognitive dreams are common. He concluded that many people have them without realizing it, perhaps because they do not recall the details or fail to properly interpret the dream symbols.

The existence of precognition is disputed by skeptics who believe that there is a lack of scientific evidence supporting the existence of precognition and who contend that examples of what are commonly thought to be precognition can be explained naturally without evoking supernatural abilities. Skeptics point to the fact that the human memory has a tendency to selectively recall coincidences and forget all of the other examples.

Examples include thinking of a specific individual right before the individual thought of calls on the phone. Human memory has a tendency to remember the instances where the individual thought of calls and forget the instances where the individual calls when not thought of just prior to calling. This is an example of selection bias and skeptics assert that examples of precognition are better explained using psychology and natural human tendencies opposed to supernatural or paranormal powers.

According to many Taoist related practices, abilities such as clairvoyance and many other abilities are by-products of spiritual awakening and the realization of divine consciousness. Buddhist teaching says such powers may arise in someone who has developed high states of mental concentration, but such powers are in no way seen to be a prerequisite to enlightenment. In fact, they can act an obstacle in that they may divert the practitioner from the goal.

Integral to spiritual and mind expansion is breathwork and meditation. By expanding lung capacity and learning to use the lungs to direct energy around the body and open the subtle energy channels we also naturally expand the mind and refine consciousness. This is how these seemingly miraculous powers develop, though they are not truly miraculous. They are considered to be latent abilities that everyone possesses but need waking up.

Claims for the existence of paranormal psychic abilities such as clairvoyance are highly controversial. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of such paranormal phenomena is not accepted by the scientific community outside parapsychology.